Dog didn’t know why they moved so slowly. Maybe their blood wasn’t flowing, or the cold had some effect on them. Either way, he and Sadahiko charged at them side by side. They knew they didn’t have long before Minoru was overrun or forced to retreat.
Plunging into the midst of the trudging creatures, Sadahiko struck with furious glee, chopping them down at the neck one after another like bamboo stalks, his sword whistling, cutting first air and then bone. Dog actually saw him smile. As for himself, he accounted for two, tripping them up with the butt end of the sasumata and then slicing their heads off as they struggled to rise.
Sadahiko turned wildly, and for a second Dog lifted his sasumata defensively, thinking he would feel that sharp sword next.
“Let’s go!” Sadahiko hissed.
He ran back to the west gate, and Dog struggled to keep up.
They passed through the gate into the large western courtyard. Directly before them, the infirmary was a shambles, as was the adjoining greater jail. How many prisoners had that jail housed? Seventy? Ninety? Dog didn’t like to think about it.
To their right they saw the backs of the hundred or more infected prisoners waddling toward the bell tower in the far eastern corner, behind the lesser jail (which still appeared to be locked and intact).
Dog could see the scaffold of the tower, and make out the dark iron bell on the flat platform. He supposed any one of them could have simply gone up there and rang the bell, but hell, he wouldn’t have been crazy enough to do it. Then he saw Minoru. The man was marching solemnly around the bell, the flute to his lips. As he watched, a few of the jikininki crowding the base of the tower began to tentatively scale it. They wobbled and fell back into the crowd, but always two or three rose to replace them. He wouldn’t last long up there.
Then they heard a sound that made their skin rise. They had not stopped running toward the lesser jail, but they did look over their shoulders to see the source of the strange, high wail that rose above the noise of the jikininki. What they saw nearly caused them to pitch face first into the snow.
It was the women.
Last to be infected, last to leave their sequestered jailhouse nestled in the southwest corner of the prison, they were coming steadily across the snow—all of them. At least thirty, Dog thought. In their pale prison garb and with their deathly skin and chalk eyes, they melted into the winter white but for their streaming black hair and splotches of bright red blood. Truly, they were like a retinue of Yuki-onna spirits storming across the snow, ephemeral and beauteous, yet terrifying for all their anachronistically savage expressions. The queer, high-pitched sound that burst from their slender throats was mangled as it passed through their gnashing teeth. The sight of Dog and Sadahiko enraged them, and it chilled Dog’s soul.
Sadahiko felt it too, and he hissed;
“Don’t look at them! Run!”
They ran, but it was hard going through the snow. They reached the lesser jail door well before the women, but when Dog leaned against the bars panting, Sadahiko jerked him back. Five pairs of arms thrust through and grabbed the space he had narrowly vacated.
Dog landed on his ass in the wet snow and nearly lost his sasumata. He fished for it frantically. When his fingers closed around it, he was already standing.
The women were coming up on them, stumbling over each other in their haste.
Sadahiko hacked at the groping arms, lopping away hands and fingers like candle wax. The things did not recoil but prodded him with bleeding stumps protruding shorn bone.
He stood back and tore the keys from his clothing. “Hold them back!” he shouted.
Dog glanced back and saw the ones behind the door, but he was unsure if Sadahiko meant them or the approaching women. Keeping the blade of the polearm angled toward the onrushing mob, he shoved the butt-end through the gaps in the bars hard, knocking a few of the jikininki inside flat on their backs.
It was enough. Sadahiko thrust the key into the lock and turned, then swung the door open.
He stepped across the threshold and gaped.
A dozen or more jikininki were staggering out of the dark room.
Dog looked over his shoulder and saw the trouble. They were trapped. His eyes fell … and there, struggling to get up, face half torn away and one eye plucked out, was the warden himself.
“Look there! On the floor!” he shouted, and turned back to the women just as the first of them charged him with open arms and mouth roaring.
Dog shoved the crescent blade into her open mouth and with the help of her own momentum, sheared off the upper half of her face, sidestepping the flailing, spurting body in time to meet two others whom he battered down with the haft.
Sadahiko saw. He jumped into the room and swung down at the disfigured warden as he sat up. Tasogare parted the warden’s head and wedged halfway down his chest in his breastbone. It was the most magnificent cut he’d ever made.
As the body sank back, the upper head and neck peeling into two bleeding halves, one whole the other a nightmare of exposed tissue and bone, he pulled the sword free and chopped the jikininki on his left down at the knees. He pushed the other back with his foot and thrust his hand frantically into the warden’s robes as the dozen advancing on him howled and stretched their arms towards him.
Dog swept the sasumata back and forth. He had fought off a gang once the very same way with a whip-like bamboo fishing pole, but in that instance, fear of pain had driven the superior number back. These women stepped heedlessly into his arc and fell, some only to rise once more, not even stunned by the force of his blows or the horror of their wounds. He whimpered. This was hellish work, cutting into a crowd of women.
He was nearly overcome when he recognized one of the women as Oyuki, the old white haired crone who had worked as the prison asaji, attending to the female prisoners and washing the heads of the executed. Auntie Oyuki, he had always called her. She had washed his feet with cool water from the courtyard well on hot, dusty days. He split the side of her old head open above the ear and sent her down hard. Doing it nearly made him vomit.
But it wasn’t Old Oyuki and they weren’t women, he told himself. Not anymore.
Then he thought, what if his father still worked here at the prison? He had no idea if he was even alive. But no, the eta corpse handlers had gone home, hadn’t they? Yes, otherwise Koda Moan’s body wouldn’t have stayed in the lesser jail overnight.
If his father still lived, he was sleeping down by the river in the eta village in the old hut. And his mother? His sister? If he lived through this nightmare … no.
He wouldn’t think about that.
Sadahiko ducked out, curling fingers tearing his sleeves. He slammed the cell shut and broke off the key, then turned in time to cut a woman from her shoulder to her armpit.
“I’ve got them!” Sadahiko shouted, feeling the cold iron ring against his belly.
Dog shoved two of the women back. He couldn’t cut them anymore. Though they were swiftly trapping them in a semicircle in front of the lesser jail, he just couldn’t.
“The flute!” Sadahiko exclaimed.
What flute? Dog thought, and then realized what he was getting at.
The absence of it was deafening.
Then they heard a roaring noise from behind the lesser jail. They both knew what it meant. Minoru was dead. The mass of jikininki would return, attracted by the sounds of the women.
Sadahiko lashed out, cutting the women to pieces like dolls. Delicate, porcelain heads spun through the air, long black hair whipping about.
Dog was using the back end of his sasumata, shoving them away like unruly livestock.
“What are you doing?” Sadahiko screamed. “Cut them down!”
Dog shook his head, tears in his eyes. It was too horrible. They were so beautiful, even in this horrendous state. He had no right.
Then the crowd of jikininki came surging around the corners of the jailhouse, relentless, infinite. They pressed through the trilling women, bloody a
nd terrible. Dog turned his blade on them, unable to discern anymore. He and Sadahiko were two threshers in a field, two trees groaning before a broken levee.
Then, from the sky, a T-shaped tsukubō descended between them.
Sadahiko glanced up.
Minoru was braced on the lip of the jailhouse roof, holding the tsukubō down to them by the butt.
“Grab on, young master!” he called.
While not bladed, the ‘T’ on the tsukubō was studded with small barbs up to about a shaku down the length of the haft, so that a criminal couldn’t grab it and force it away without tearing up his hands. Minoru had wrapped the T end in cloth torn from the hem of his prison robe.
Sadahiko whipped the blood off his sword and took the blade in his teeth. He grabbed the tsukubō with both hands, leaping up as Minoru swung. He left the ground and reached out, hands clamping on the edge of the roof. He drew his feet up.
Minoru swung the tsukubō back down to Dog.
Dog thrust his own weapon lengthwise at the front row of the jikininki, forcing them back, then turned and grabbed the proffered lifeline. He fumbled, almost fell, but Sadahiko, who had pulled himself up in the interim, grabbed his arm and held him.
One of the things reached up and hugged his ankle, teeth seeking his flesh.
He screamed and kicked out, pulping its nose, but it would not let go.
Sadahiko lay on his belly on the roof and pushed the point of his sword into its eye. When the blade finally broke through the back of its skull, it released Dog and dropped into the crowd below.
Sadahiko pushed Jinza’s keys into Minoru’s hands. “Lock them in! We’ll head for the main gate.”
Minoru nodded and smiled in his way, clutching the key ring like a treasure.
They ran across the roof of the jailhouse, slipping on the snow, the jikininki following their progress on the ground, stumbling to keep up.
They dropped down on the south edge, collapsing in the snow and pulling themselves up as the army of jikininki came lumbering like a single, massive creature across the courtyard.
Rushing through, Sadahiko and Minoru turned and pushed the ponderous gate closed as Dog picked up the tsukubō and kept watch.
The gate slammed shut and Minoru fitted the key in as it began to thud from the impact of the bodies colliding on the other side.
“Go, young master!” Minoru shouted. “My jikininki won’t wait long.”
Dog and Sadahiko ran, turning south, slipping and crashing in the powder in their haste.
Dog marveled that the old man had survived. What this crazed killer had done to deserve the protection of karma he didn’t know.
Sadahiko’s eyes swept the courtyard lanes and the dark doorway of the guardhouse almost hopefully. His heart was racing. He could almost feel every drop of blood that coursed through his limbs. The air in his stinging lungs was pure as a wind from heaven. He was more alive than he’d ever been. Tonight he was not the dispassionate slaughterer his father had called him in his final hours. Tried in glorious battle, he had cut down scores of men like a storied warrior.
Dog was the first to reach the gate. He could see the sky paling over the treetops through the arrow slits.
He turned, and watched Sadahiko looking all around as he approached.
Dog was alive, and more, there was life ahead of him. His family’s village lay no more than a few minutes further down the road. And past that? Across the sea? No. Across the ocean, maybe. Somehow. To Chūgoku, Kankoku, anywhere. He was going to get the hell out of Japan. He didn’t understand what was happening in this prison. Maybe somehow the gods existed, and all the tainted blood of his eta ancestors, of all the people who had bowed down to this government of slaughter and death had sown the ground with some evil and the jikininki were the shoots breaking the killing grounds to tear down the shogun and the bakufu and the weakling emperor, the unavoidable fist of gou. Maybe this world was ending as Minoru said and the start of it all had been born here tonight, bloody and screaming and white eyed.
Whatever.
He didn’t want to be Red Dog anymore. He didn’t want to live in madness and death. He swore if he could find a way, he would leave this land behind him forever. There had to be a place where no one had ever heard of eta.
Sadahiko handed him the keys. With supreme satisfaction, he unlocked the gate crank housing and put his all into lowering the drawbridge.
Sadahiko paced back and forth before the gate, staring up the way they’d come. Surely this wasn’t the end. Surely there was more death to be dealt, more cutting to be done. But the night was ending. Even now the east gleamed brightly as the wavy hamon on the face of Japanese steel.
“Where is that old man?” he said aloud, giving voice to his annoyance.
“I don’t care,” said Dog, panting at the wheel, yet blessing the fire in his arms and the wonderful clanking of the drawbridge lowering. “I’m done. Finished. I’m getting the hell out of here.”
Sadahiko breathed in the cool morning air.
The drawbridge thundered onto the far bank of the moat beyond the heavy gate doors. Dog locked it into place, feeling its final settling reverberate through his bones, through his heart. He ran to throw up the heavy bar. As he stopped to raise it, they both heard the unearthly flute.
It was so still. As still as it had been at twilight, when the newly fallen snow had muffled the earth. Even the riotous sounds of the jikininki were suspiciously absent. Maybe the light of dawn had put an end to them. Maybe such things could not thrive beneath the sun.
Then they saw Minoru walking across the courtyard toward them, playing his flute.
Behind him, the entirety of the cannibal dead marched, as if in a Shinto procession.
Sadahiko’s lips parted, but he said nothing. Did Minoru truly hold some sway over these creatures?
When the creatures saw Sadahiko and Dog at the far end of the compound, they began to howl and groan as they had before.
Minoru kept up his pace and his playing, even as the things all around him limped past hurriedly.
Dog heaved the bar off the gate and let it crash to the ground. He pushed with all his strength, swinging the heavy doors wide and rushing out onto the drawbridge.
Halfway across he stopped.
Against the sky he saw the dark silhouettes of the crucified dead, still lashed to their execution frames, flanking the path, the bakufu’s visual deterrent to the would-be criminals and upstarts who might dare to oppose the shogun’s edicts.
They were twitching and rocking on their crosses.
They began to moan.
He stared, horrified. Then he saw the others.
There was a mass of dark figures moving slowly beneath the trees on the far bank of the moat, lining the road that led to the river.
Dog dropped to one knee and sat down heavily.
Behind him, Sadahiko backed onto the drawbridge, staring.
“Minoru!” he screamed. “What’s happening?”
Minoru stopped playing his flute. He was weeping. He raised his arms, the sleeves falling back to his shoulders.
His spindly, shit-mottled arms were red, perforated over every inch with bite marks and coursing blood, the white bones exposed in some places where the fatty flesh had been eaten away.
“You’re welcome, my children!” he called in a breaking voice. “You’re welcome! I love you!”
His voice dwindled as the mindless creatures passed him by. Sadahiko could almost imagine he saw Minoru’s bulbous eyes clouding white.
Sadahiko stood over Dog’s shoulder, gripping his sword with both hands, ready to die fighting.
“Eta or no,” he said to Dog. “We will die together as warriors. As samurai.”
“What?” said Dog distractedly, watching the dark figures approaching from the far bank. He turned away and looked up at Sadahiko. He didn’t want to see their faces.
“Tonight, you and I fought with distinction. Those we slew will attest to that in the next life.”<
br />
Dog chuckled.
“The next life? You damned samurai, always looking for honor in slaughter,” Dog smirked. “We may as well have been mowing grass. They didn’t fight us, we fought them. Feh! It doesn’t matter.”
He shook his head and put his hands over his ears and closed his eyes, tired.
“You’re an idiot, corpse cutter,” he muttered.
The drawbridge underneath them shook with the march of the jikininki.
ZOMBIE SAFARI
by Ben Cheetham
* * *
Ben Cheetham’s short fiction has won awards and been published in numerous magazines and anthologies in the UK, US and Australia. Most recently Voice From the Planet (published by Harvard Square Editions) and Fast Forward: The Mix Tape, A Collection of Flash Fiction. He’s a 2010 Pushcart Prize nominee. He’s recently completed his first novel—a dark psychological tale touching on themes such as the corrupting power of money, grief, love, infidelity, schizophrenia, murder and end-of-the-world paranoia—for which he’s currently seeking representation. Sometimes he thinks a zombie apocalypse would change his life for the better.
* * *
Day One.
We got up at six a.m. and packed our gear into the boat. I took my APR Single Shot hunting handgun and my Safari 850 rifle. The APR has proven itself over many years as the handgun of choice for serious hunters—shot by seven of the top ten competitors at the International PZH (Pro Zombie Hunter) Championships last year. It’s the only gun in its class to have twice broken the world record for one shot knockdowns at 550 metres. Last year, on a trip to the South Western Reserve, I made a 450 metre shot. Luckily Tommy was with me otherwise no one would’ve believed it.
I firmly believe there’s no finer hunting handgun on the planet than the APR Single Shot. Of course, Bob reckons that’s a load of crap. He maintains that the F-33 Contender is the superior pistol. Now don’t get me wrong, in terms of versatility and user friendliness in the field the F-33 is unmatched by any other handgun. If it’s accuracy and proven long range performance you’re looking for, though, the APR comes out on top every time.
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